Potential
by CrayolaMarkers
Summary: If Bella had personality and wasn't quite so hard to hate, Twilight could be a good story. If Edward had a reason for being a jerkface and actually changed as a person, Twilight could be a great story. This Twilight re-write is, hopefully, that story.
1. Where I Get a Schizophrenic Lab Partner

**A/N: Sheesh, what am I thinking? I'll probably delete this. Tomorrow. Unless somebody likes it, which is doubful.**

* * *

I know what you're thinking. Why would this Edward guy even bother?

Believe me, I was just as surprised as you. I'd come from Arizona, where 90% of everybody was tan and amazingly good-looking, and while I'm not grotesquely deformed or anything, I'm not gorgeous, either. I'm just Bella Swan: fish-belly pale, on the skinny side, and about as toned and fit as a flatworm.

So here I was, first day at Forks High School, and suddenly the boy next to me, with goldish-brown hair and even paler skin than I had, is giving me an intense glare. It wasn't anything romantic. More like, _aha, there's that girl who was in front of me in the lunch line and got the last tamale! Bitch!_

I knew who he was already; his whole family had paraded in during lunch that day, all dressed in whites and pastels, sitting at their own table like they had better things to do than mingle with other high-schoolers. Or maybe they were just shy. Or maybe, like this boy, this Edward Cullen, they were all psychotic.

_Who're they? _I'd asked my exceptionally-new friend, Jessica Stanley--four feet ten inches of curly hair, smiles, and garrulous enthusiasm. _The ones who look like they're dressed like angels or something._

She'd taken a quick peek to confirm who I was talking about and giggled. _The Cullens_, she's said and smiled like she knew a secret. She'd named every one of them, which I thought was pretty impressive. I couldn't name anybody but my friends back in Phoenix. Our classes were _huge_.

And then she said they were all adopted or foster kids or something who never talked to anyone.

So that left me, here, with one of the Cullens.

At first I was just kind of uncomfortable, waiting for Mr. Banner to begin talking about...I don't know. Whatever stuff they talked about in Biology II. The life cycle of the cicada. Turnips. Anything.

But Mr. Banner was turning out to be the laid-back kind of teacher who waits two thousand years to start class after the bell's rung, and anybody I knew _at all _was sitting with their partners across the room. Like Jessica, the short girl who'd showed me around this morning. I would have _adored_ having Jessica as a partner. I mean, I got the feeling she was only being nice to me because I was The New Kid, but I liked her anyway. She was chatty, she was fun.

And, unlike some partners, she wouldn't have been staring at me like she had laser-beam vision.

"Okay," I finally said in exasperation to the boy next to me. "You're Edward, right? Jessica was talking about you during lunch."

He paused, then nodded the most pathetic nod in the world. His head might have moved a centimeter.

"Um, can you talk?" I asked.

He paused _again_. "Yes," he muttered.

"So, would you mind telling me why you're staring at me like I ran over your grandma?" I asked without bothering to be polite. I mean, okay, it was rude, but he _was _staring at me. Politeness had kind of gone out the window already. "Or are you just spacing out?"

His knuckles clenched on top of the table, so they turned from mostly-white to entirely-white, and he quickly stowed them underneath the tabletop, in his lap. "I suppose I'm...spacing out," he murmured.

Well, I wanted to say, you look like you're a superb creep. An admittedly very good-looking creep, but a creep nonetheless.

You'd think he'd quit being weird after twenty, thirty, maybe forty-five minutes...but no. He was silent and frosty toward me the ENTIRE TIME. And not in an "I'm paying attention to the teacher" kind of way. He made a big deal out of scooting his chair as far away from me as possible. Then he leaned to the side and practically held his nose like I smelled bad.

Normally, I'd be really embarrassed, because this rather attractive guy was implying that I needed to shower. But I knew for a fact that I smelled _fine._ If you were going to a new school for the first time, wouldn't you take a bath and put on deodorant like six times and even wear a little scented body spray? Yes. You would. And so did I. In fact, I smelled a lot like a ripe strawberry by now.

But maybe Edward Cullen had an aversion to strawberries, because the _millisecond_ the bell rang, he jumped out of his seat and scrambled for the door.

"Sheesh," I muttered. "What a drama queen."

I hadn't expected anybody to respond, but somebody did: a male somebody.

"Yep," this guy said. "Don't worry about it--Cullen's always been like that."

I turned around to see a pretty cute boy, with blond spiked hair and blue jacket, giving me a wry smile. Maybe there was hope. Maybe Edward Cullen was the only boy at this school who hated strawberries.

"So it's not just me?" I asked.

"Definitely not," he grinned. "If I'd been lucky enough to get a spot next to you, _I _wouldn't have acted like him. Trust me," he picked up my books, which I didn't particularly appreciate because I wasn't into chivalry, but it was still really nice of him. "You're Isabella, right?"

"Yeah. Friends call me Bella."

"Maybe we should be friends, then. Isabella's kind of a long name."

"What's _your_ name?" I asked as we headed out the door. "Nicodemus?"

"Mike," said Mike, satisfied with himself. "I win the name-shortness contest."

If you forgot how melodramatic my lab partner was, I was having an exceptionally lucky day. Mike Newton and I both had P.E. next, so we got to walk together, and true to his word, I got a new friend. It sort of seemed like most of the people in Forks had lived here forever, but Mike, like me, was a new kid once upon a time. He lived in California until sixth grade.

"So you had to move here in middle school?" my face turned genuinely sympathetic. "Yeesh. That's awful. Middle school's bad enough without moving to a new state."

"It was all right," he shrugged. "People here are friendly, more friendly than my old school. It's nice that everybody knows each other, you know?"

As you can see, it was pretty comforting to talk to Mike.

Continuing my lucky streak, I didn't have to even play volleyball with everybody else, because it was my first day (good for me, because I sucked), _and_ it finally stopped raining by the time the last bell rang, _and_ Jessica, who looked like she had about ten zillion friends anyway, decided to walk to the parking lot with me instead. Should've known it was too good to last.

We tugged on our coats as we passed under the fluorescent lights of the hallways, and for once, Forks didn't seem so bad. In Phoenix, you could never feel this cozy. It was always just...heat. But I still felt a little guilty about all the attention I was suddenly getting. I mean, it was terrific, but still. Something was nagging me in the back of my mind.

"Hey Jessica?" I asked as we walked. "If I ask you something, will you promise not to think I'm weird?"

"Well, _duh._ Go ahead," she said, but her face wasn't making any promises. She was already looking at me like I'd spilled tomato sauce down my shirt.

I bit my lip. "It's a dumb question...but uh, do you think people would still be this nice to me and stuff? If I wasn't the new kid?"

Jessica was silent. Which was weird for her. "Mike was looking at you a lot during P.E.," she said stonily.

"I know, and I'm not exactly beautiful," I said. "I'm thinking it's 'cause I just got here. So, if I'd been at this school forever, would you still be walking with me and all?"

She considered this. "You think Mike has a crush on you?" she asked.

"Not at all. I'm just different because I'm new."

She grinned, much happier. "Well, yeah, of course I'd still be friends with you."

"For real?"

"Yeah. I mean...if you were like Janice over there, probably not," she jerked her head toward a sullen-looking girl with pale skin and a skinny frame, leaning against the doorway and reading a book by herself. "But you're, you know, not. We'd be friends anyway, don't you think?"

I was about to give her a hey-not-cool look for being mean to Janice, but something stopped me. We were passing by the office, and my least-favorite person in the world was in there. Talking. I guess he wasn't a mute after all.

"Hold on, that's my lab partner," I muttered with distaste. "Want to see what he's up to?"

"Oh, I don't know if we should really be spying..." she told me without much conviction. It didn't matter, anyway, because in about five minutes we were perched against the back wall, peeking around the side window.

"What, does he have a huge crush on you, too?" Jessica said, irritated.

"He hates me," I said cheerfully. "He acted like I smelled bad all through biology today, and didn't say a word to me."

"Oh. Well, you smell fine," she told me, going back to staring at the Cullen kid. "Speaking of biology, he's trying to quit the class."

"Terrific!" I cheered under my breath. Except then, something hit me. "Wait a sec...you don't think he's trying to be all dramatic and drop out just because of me, do you?"

"That'd be embarrassing," she said with a giggle. "But maybe he can't stand how normal you smell."

I frowned. "Hold up, she's not letting him switch."

"You should go talk to him," Jessica urged me, still giggly. "Tell him what a jerk he's being."

"Okay, that sounds like a _terrible _idea."

"So you'll do it, right?"

I sighed angrily as Edward turned around and saw me. He gave me this awful glare, even worse than in biology class, which just pissed me off. I mean_, what did I ever do to him?!_ I'd never find out if I never asked. "Yep," I told Jessica, stepping out from our hideout to face Edward head-on.

"So. Trying to drop biology?" I asked, being as friendly as possible. No, really. I was smiling and everything.

He gritted his teeth together and avoided looking at me. "Yes. I've already learnt the material. To take the class is a waste of time."

"Well, I took biology last year, too," I said, trying to sound sweet but confident. I also couldn't believe this guy just used the word _learnt_. "But it obviously doesn't make me smarter than anyone else. It's not like you're the world leading expert on biology, you know."

His face was a weird mix of hate and surprise. Edward wasn't glaring anymore, but his nose was wrinkled, like, _what does this chick think she's doing_?

"Plus, you still want me as a partner, _of course_," I said, sarcastic but a little less certain. "Right? I mean, I'm not a genius or anything, but--"

"Are you...always this talkative?" he interrupted quietly.

I looked at him stupidly. "Well. Yeah."

He stared at me with another strange look on his face (man, this guy never seemed to run out of those). "I have to go," he said suddenly.

"Where?" I asked.

The bastard didn't answer me. He just stormed out of the room like I'd insulted his perfectly-gelled bouffant.

Jessica, of course, thought this was all roaringly funny, and teased me about it all the way back to my car. I probably should've felt insulted--okay, I _did_ feel a little bad--but as I turned on the ignition of my spunky old '53 Chevy, I realized that maybe this wasn't a bad thing.

So this weird guy had found me inexplicably repelling. Splendid! With any luck, I wouldn't have to deal with him ever again. At least, not outside of the bio classroom. And maybe he had a point, I thought in the middle of listening to an old classical music CD. I _was_ a little on the weird side, what with my beat-up truck and…interesting musical taste. If he didn't want to associate with me, fine.

When he didn't show up the next day, I considered it doubly splendid.

And the day after that--tripley splendid.

When he didn't show up the rest of the _week_, I thought I'd gotten used to it. So what if I didn't have a bio partner, right?

But he stuck around in my head, popping up when I didn't want him to. I'd be lounging around the school lawn with Mike, laughing about some stupid made-for-TV movie we'd both seen, and _pop_, the Edward kid would zip into my head. Or I'd be taking my first math test at Forks High School, racking my brain for the formula of an elongated conic section, and _pop_, I'd think of Edward Cullen insead.

I didn't know why. I hardly knew him. I wanted to wipe him away from my memory, which would hopefully stop him from taking up valuable brain space that could be used for remembering conic section formulas.

But, looking back, it probably didn't matter how hard I tried to forget the Cullen kid that first week.

I didn't know what was coming on Tuesday.


	2. Where I Discover He Can Actually Speak

**A/N: YAY! Somebody likes it!! I'll continue then. For the record, in my Twilight Rewrite, Edward can't read minds. That's just dumb. He has enough perfect qualities as it is.**

**But the general story's still the same, so if you've read Twilight, you know what this is. This is MITOSIS DAY in biology! You know, the cute scene with their first real conversation?**

* * *

"Want a muffin, Edward?"

That was my brilliant conversation-starter, in Monday's biology class on the week my life changed forever.

Edward--you remember, my psycho lab partner who'd disappeared all last week--was back for biology this week. Inexplicably.

I actually was kind of excited to see him, because I was expecting him to do something remarkably douchebaggy that I could tell to Jessica and Angela. I'd been hanging out with them all last week and most of the weekend, and here's what we liked to do: 1) hang out in Port Angeles. 2) talk about Mike, Eric, or Tyler. 3) laugh about Edward the Creep. With any luck, he would do something really hilarious, and then I could tell the story and everyone would laugh until their sides hurt. It was a great plan.

At least, that _was_ my plan, until I opened my mouth. The moment I offered him a muffin, I looked at his face, and something about him was…different. Maybe it was the way he wasn't holding his nose and flinching, or maybe the way his light-brown eyes looked kind vulnerable.

He looked like a little kid, actually. Like a little kid sitting by himself on the side of the playground, and here I was, asking him to join me in a game of double-dutch jumprope.

"Ah…ah, no thank you," he finally said, all confused and disoreniented. "Why did you bring muffins for class?"

I shrugged. "Felt like baking."

That was _kind of_ true. What I didn't tell him was that I actually woke up at five A.M. sobbing out of homesickness, and needed something to get my mind off of Phoenix and my mom.

"So you like to cook?" he asked politely. Wait, so he was talking to me now? Had the muffins changed his mind? He wasn't eating one yet…

"Yeah," I took a muffin, strawberry cinnamon and topped with sugar granules, off the silvery tray I'd brought. "That explains why they look so smushy, see?"

When I said that, he…smiled. _What?! He's capable of smiling?!_

"Esmé likes to cook," he said finally. "You two would like each other, I'd imagine."

"Who's Esmé?"

"My mother," he said, plugging in the microscope in front of us. Everything he did was very careful, very precise. It kind of bugged me, but I obviously didn't say so.

I frowned. "You call your mom by her first name?"

"STUDENTS!" Mr. Banner cut off whatever Edward was going to say. I told you he took forever to start class. "Today's _mitosis phase identification _day. You have five slides of onion root--identify them. You've got twenty minutes, go go go!"

And with that, he pressed this huge timer in the front of the room. Like we were actually going to race to identify the phases of mitosis. Right.

"You heard the man," I told Edward. "First slide! Stat!"

Edward bit his lip to keep from smiling again--God forbid, right?--and slid the first onion root slide under the microscope. Luckily, that meant he didn't see Mike, who was looking at me with a stunned expression and mouthing _what the hell?_ while pointing to Edward.

I grinned a huge, cheesy grin and waved at him. I mean, what else was there to say?

"Prophase," Edward said in an oh-so-confident voice.

"_Excellente_," I scribbled it on our sheet and switched out the slides before Mike could ask me something else that I couldn't answer. "I think this one's ana--"

"Mike thinks you shouldn't be talking to me," Edward muttered in my ear, which I was totally not expecting, and besides which, it tickled. As in, _really_ tickled.

I practically jumped out of my seat.

"What the hell, Edward?" I whispered, ticked off.

"Well, he doesn't." He was trying to sound all calm and superior. "You can tell by how he's looking at you."

"Terrific," I said. "But how about you save the Dr. Phil stuff until after we're finished with the lab, okay? This one's anaphase."

"Mind if I check?" he asked.

"I do mind, actually. But you can do the next one," I said, yanking my slide out before he could check my answer anyway.

"Interphase," he said, then glanced back at me. It was kind of embarrassing, because I'd been staring at him. It's always awkward when someone catches you staring.

But I'd been trying to decide what was different about him, apart from his looking like a lost second-grader on the playground. White skin, goldish-brown hair, light brown eyes…oh, _that_ was it.

"Your eyes changed color," I said quickly to avoid awkwardness.

"Excuse me?"

"They're brown now, kind of gold-ish," I explained. "Weren't they darker last time, you know, you actually came to class?"

He busied himself with writing _interphase_ on our worksheet at a snail-like pace. Gosh, he had girly handwriting. Was that _cursive_? Who even used cursive in America anymore? I thought everybody stopped after third grade, when they made us learn it.

He wasn't going to answer, so I kept going. "So, why _weren't_ you in class? Ski trip? Injury?"

"Hunting trip, actually," he said, grinning like this was some hilarious inside joke.

"Ah. And you're talking to me now because…?"

He didn't have a good answer for that one. "I was inconsiderately rude," he said after a pause. "I didn't properly introduce myself last week."

Thank you for not answering my question at all. "It's okay. Everybody knows everybody around here. I already knew your name, remember?"

"You never told me yours," he said, which was dumb. He'd heard Mike say "_Arrivaderci_, Bella!" at least twice that morning.

"I'm Bella Swan," I said anyway, and smiled. "The kid from Arizona."

"_Arizona_. What a long way from Washington. Why did you move?"

_Nooooo_. I hated answering this question. "Um, if I stayed at home, my mom couldn't travel around the country with my stepdad. So _voilà_, here I am."

That was also true. Very condensed, but true.

"That's quite selfless of you," he said softly. Okay, there were a lot of things I didn't like about Edward, but flattery was not one of them. He was a pretty good flatterer.

"Thanks." I half-smiled back.

But really, no, it wasn't selfless. I'd left Mom and Phil to their adventures because I thought I could be independent here. Dad would be at work all day, right? And when I came up to visit Forks in the summers, he pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. Moving to Forks until I graduated? Sounded like freedom to me.

So, you see, it wasn't saintlike or selfless of me at all. Selfish, if anything. And this morning's weepiness was pure coincidence. I hadn't known, back when I decided to move, how much I'd miss Mom. Or the heat and opennness of Phoenix. Or the fact that I had a lifetime of memories with my friends in Arizona.

But I hardly knew Edward Cullen, so I couldn't tell him any of this.

I scribbled down the last two slides (_mesophase_, _interphase_) and leaned back in my chair. "We're done," I said, kind of in awe that we were the first ones finished. I _never_ finished labs first.

"Lucky us," Edward said sullenly.

I shifted in my seat, draping my arms over the back. "What's your deal, Edward?" I asked, genuinely curious. "You never talk to anyone, you ignored me last week, you seem bored with school..."

"You have no idea," he said, rolling his eyes. This bugged me.

"Exactly, which is why I'm asking."

He sighed and rearranged the onion root slides. "It sometimes feels as if…as if I'm missing the good parts of life. I don't mean to…keep to myself so much, but I'm not sure how to stop. At any rate, I'm almost _certain _that learning mitosis phases isn't what life is about."

Edward had his eyes glued to the slides he was arranging and re-arranging, but I was looking at him. Because, here's the thing, I kind of knew what he was talking about. I mean, sure, in the long run, school was going to help us. We'd get into better colleges, we'd be better-educated citizens, yadda yadda yadda.

But on days like these, sometimes you felt like, maybe we should all ditch school and go hiking or something. Or go to Paris. You know, live a little bit.

"I'm sure that all sounds terribly pretentious," he said quickly. Still not looking at me.

"No, actually," I shook my head. "I was thinking the same thing. I've got some advice for your keeping-to-yourself problem, though, if you want to hear it."

He finished stacking the slides, _finally_, and looked me in the eye. "Go ahead."

"Well, I'm not sure if anybody's told you this lately, Edward, but you're kind of a douchebag."

His goldish eyes grew _huge_. Big as saucers, I'm not kidding.

"A douchebag?" he repeated.

"Jerk," I corrected myself. "A little bit. Not in a _bad_ way, you see, but you can't go around ignoring people or sitting by yourself at lunch and expect people to be friends with you."

"Perhaps you should keep your advice to yourself," he said frostily. "Which one of us is _new_ here, hmm?"

"Which one of us has friends here, hmm?" I said, sticking my tongue out at him. "I'm never going to be Miss Popular, but at least I don't ignore people. Come on. I mean, sit with us at lunch tomorrow."

"No."

"Come _on_, Edward. With that attitude, your life's just going to be this huge black pit of despair."

"What if I like it that way?" he asked, his face all cold and mopey.

I didn't get a chance to answer, because Mr. Banner decided to proclaim us the winners. Which meant class was over, and gym was starting.

_Bleh_.

If there is one thing I have never, ever, ever been and will never be my entire life, it is athletic.

I'll give you an idea of how bad I was: even Jessica didn't pick me for her team in the volleyball scrimmages. Which was understandable, but still made me feel all pissy and mean inside. Angela wasn't there, so I was stranded. Maybe, _maybe_, if today was a co-ed day, Mike would pair up with me, and I could basically play cheerleader while he played for both of us.

But Mike was not there, and I realized that maybe Edward was right, back in biology. Having three or four friends didn't make me any better than him. I was just as alone, in fact, as he was.

As I was schlumping back to my car, thinking ungenerous thoughts about life (_I hate Jessica for not picking me. I hate myself for being flabby and useless. I hate Angela for not being in gym with me. I hate Mike for being male)_, one boy in the parking lot stood out to me. A pale kid in front of a new-looking Volvo.

"Hey," Edward Cullen said. It sounded _so _strange when he said it, like that time my grandmother said _funky_.

I heaved my backpack into the passenger seat and tried to go back to looking grumpy. It was hard, hiding my smile. "Hey, yourself."

"How was your gym class?" he asked politely.

I nearly hit my head on the car door, turning around to face him. "How'd you know I was in gym?"

He bit his lip, and it looked like he didn't have a good answer. "I…ah, sort of saw your schedule last week. It was under your binder and all. I wasn't trying to pry."

"Gotcha," I said, shutting the door to my truck and leaning back. Hey, if Cullen wasn't in a hurry to leave, why should I be? "Still think your life's a giant pit of despair?"

He waltzed over to me, hands in his pockets. Have I mentioned that he was wearing a _pea coat_? Yes, one of those little gray numbers. I know he didn't mean to look pretentious, and I shouldn't judge him based on his clothes or anything, but sheesh. I'd buy him a ski jacket myself. "I've been mulling it over last period. Perhaps you're right."

"So you'll sit with us tomorrow?" I asked, like it was no big deal. Because it totally wasn't.

He rocked back and forth on his feet, like a little kid. "Yes," he said decisively.

I grinned--I couldn't help myself. Yeah, he'd been a jerk last week, but somehow I felt like I was doing something right by helping the Cullen kid along. Maybe it wasn't his fault that he had no social skills whatsoever. Maybe he had a disorder or some childhood problem or something, and it was my fated duty to get him back on track.

But while I was thinking about how terrific it was to be the savior of this guy's mental state, something awful caught my eye behind him.


	3. Where I Die, Almost

**A/N: This scene always bugged me, because it's the first in a long series of Edward Saving Bella's Life Heroically scenes. So I mixed it up a little…not a lot, but a little. And moved it up in the timeline, since in the book, this scene doesn't happen for another day. **_**For no reason**_** except to add another 10 pages to an already-too-long book.**

**Brownie points if you know who the guy at the beginning is!**

* * *

He was fairly handsome and looked like a cannibal.

The man was obviously _not_ a high schooler like me or Edward, but he wasn't old enough--or, hell, _clothed _enough--to be a teacher. He wore jeans and a metal-studded vest, but no shirt, which was weird considering the weather. He was bone pale, brutal, and blond, and was baring his teeth like a shark fresh from the dentist, but that wasn't what made me stare.

What made me stare was, the crazy cannibal-looking guy was perched in a tree. Glaring at us.

"Edward…?" I sort of murmured, my eyes still locked on the crazy dude. But before he even heard me, Edward had whipped his head around to see the pseudo-cannibal, just like that. Like he could practically smell him.

Cannibal Dude caught Edward's gaze in a second, and both of them tensed up. Were they both scared of each other?

I had no idea and never found out.

Due to the fact that a large navy van came barrelling toward Edward Cullen, and I, being idiotic, leapt in front to save him.

I did quite a lot of stupid things, actually, in a matter of seconds. Exhibit A: jumping in front of the van, of course. Exhibit B: just in case the screeching tires didn't alert Edward to the fact that he was about to die, I yelled _"CAR!"_ at the top of my lungs. Exhibit C: I actually thought I was going to save his life.

This is dumb because jumping in front of a car wouldn't have saved anyone's life. It's not like I could miraculously morph into an airbag just in time to block the van door. I would be summarily squished.

What was incredible about all this, what with the van screeching toward us and our imminent deaths and all, was that Edward did the same thing as me. _He also tried to block the van_.

Difference between his attempt and mine: his was successful.

Not kidding. So one second he was staring and tensing up at this creepy cannibal-dude, and the next, I'm dashing in front of him and screaming _"CAR! CAR!" _to no avail.

And _then_, he manages to contort himself like a human pretzel until he's crouched over me, and slams his arm into the side of the van. All I'm thinking, in the millisecond before arm meets metal van door, is, _wow, I wonder how they'll separate our respective body parts when they pick us up for the autopsy._

Except when his arm met the door, it did a lot of damage. As in, his arm crinkled the door like a piece of aluminum foil. The van didn't stand a chance.

Neither did our ears, apparently, because the second Edward slammed the van away, people from around the parking lot and beyond dashed to our sides with a lot of yelling. I didn't even know that many people were _in _the parking lot, to be honest. They must have materialized during our conversation, or maybe when I'd been distracted by the creepy tree-perching dude.

Wait._ The tree-perching dude. _I craned my neck (kind of difficult when you're pretzeled together with a guy on asphalt) to see if he was still in the trees, but he'd long disappeared.

Besides, we'd started hearing ruckus of the following sort:

"Ohmigod, Bella! Are you okay?"

"Did they die? Did either one of 'em die?"

"Bella! Edward!"

"Are they conscious?"

"What the hell happened to the _car_?"  I heard all that and more in this huge tsunami of sound waves, and didn't say much of anything, since I couldn't remember how. But then I saw Angela's lovely face, blurry as it was, hover in front of me. At least, I _think_ it was Angela. She had straight, light honey-brown hair and worried dark eyes, and was wearing something fuzzy and lavender-colored. Eh, 80% sure she was Angela.

I remembered enough of the English language to squeak, "Hey, Angel!"

"Are you all right?" she said, helping me out of the Edward-Bella pretzel I was forming. Edward untwisted himself as well--and man, he was _fast_ about the untwisting. "Oh no…you've got that huge gash down your leg!"

I glanced down at my admittedly bloody shin. My wound looked gross, but honestly didn't hurt at all, so much that I hadn't noticed it until she pointed it out. "Looks worse than it feels," I told her.

Despite this, Edward was being a huge pansy, and was quickly running away from the crime scene while covering his nose/mouth with his hands. Was it fear of my bloody leg? Or just shock?

I reached out to pull him back, to make him stay with us. But it was like trying to pin down smoke. My hand reached out and grabbed nothing.

"_Bella_," I heard a very welcome male voice say, right before I got swept into a tight hug. It was Mike, warm as the side of a apple cider mug and just as comforting. "Wow, I--when I saw the van going toward you, I was just--"

"I swear, it's no big deal." I hugged him more tightly, breathing in that warm appley scent. "Edward Cullen kind of…stopped the car before it hit me."

Mike pulled back and looked at me funny. "You sure?"

"Sure I'm sure. I was there, remember?"

"I know, and I believe you, only…well, wouldn't he be dead?"

I blinked. Hadn't really thought of that. "Yeah, actually," I mumbled, mulling this over.

Angela heard this and suggested that perhaps the car had been moving slower than we'd thought. Mike heard that and suggested she needed to get more powerful glasses, because Tyler was driving at a good 30 miles an hour out of the parking lot before he hit the ice, and--

"_Wait!_" I stopped him. "Tyler? As in, Tyler Crowley? It's his car?"

Mike glanced up at the navy van, which had an equal amount of scared people crowded around it. "Yep."

Oh my gosh. I didn't know Tyler too well, but we sat at the same lunch table. We'd had a short conversation about our shared love of Scooby-Doo last week. We had a lot of the same friends.

And all thanks to my great idea of standing around and talking to Edward, I'd wrecked his car and possibly his head.

I pushed through the cluster of people around his car door and couldn't help flinching when I saw his face. Next to him, my leg was barely scratched. He had thick gashes running across his forehead, as well as a quickly purpling bruise on his cheekbone, _and_ he was unconscious.

"I am so sorry, Tyler," I whispered.

The EMTs arrived within minutes, which surprised me more than it should. I mean, it's Forks. You can get anywhere within minutes. Besides, Tyler looked awful, and I _did_ have a nasty-looking gash all the way down my leg. I guess they needed to check for tetanus or whatever.

But what surprised me more than that was this feeling of uneasiness, something I couldn't shake. I mean, here were the doctors and the ambulences, and here were the teachers, and here were Mike and Angela. The creepy cannibal dude was gone. The car crash was over. So why did I have this uncomfortable tugging at the pit of my stomach?

I was already loaded in the ambulence and halfway to the hospital before I realized what is was: Edward Cullen. For reasons I couldn't actually explain, I wanted to see him again.


End file.
